Is your course schedule full yet? Some great offerings (Wiley wikis)

When I took Wiley’s course Intro to Open
Education,
it was something quite new for me, and I learnt as much from the design
(both the things done well and the things that could be improved) as I
learnt from the contents. Turns out his course has inspired a following,
who have kept learning both from his example, and from each other,
experimenting with different ways of conducting classes online, often
blending it with for-fee credit students.

I first came across Teemu’s course on Composing free and open
educational
resources.
This was conducted on Wikiversity, which was also interesting to me,
because I had been considering Wikipedia a repository of course
materials, rather than a site to conduct teaching and learning (which I
would think would require different functonality, etc). I was excited to
see this, and even wrote to Teemu asking that the lessons from
conducting such a course be written up.

Finally, Stephen Downes and George Siemens are offering what is going to
be a “megacourse” on Connectivism and Connective
Knowledge. Although there
is no detailed course plan available, they have attracted a lot of
attention, and over 1000 people have already signed up to be informed
when the course starts (of course, not all of those will participate
actively). This means that the course will function quite differently
from a smaller course with 30-50 participants where everyone - even
though it takes a lot of time - can still read everyone else’s blog
posts.

What is exciting is that there seems to be growing up a whole ecosystem
of services and projects based around this course. Not only is it being
translated into
Chinese,
Spanish and
Portuguese
(we’ll have to see how this will happen once the course actually starts,
but it’s tremendously interesting to see someone even trying to
facilitate such a course for multilingual audiences). They have a Google
group that is active with discussions, and there are proposals for local
learning communities, interactive chats, etc. I will be following this
course very closely once it starts, perhaps participating actively, to
see what new ways of interacting that develop.

In addition to the sheer amount of new courses that are explicitly
orienting themselves in a “Wiley” tradition, and learning from each
other, to the extent that Leigh Blackall coined the term “Wiley wikis”,
there is also an emerging conversation taking place about what we can
learn from these different attempts, how we should structure future
courses - in terms of instructor load, participation of students,
managing paying and non-paying students, trying to provide credit to
external students through different institutional arrangements, etc.

Leigh Blackall, Teemu Leinonen and Bronwyn Hegarty conducted a
conversation about this topic, which is available for
download. Leigh Blackall
and Sarah Stewart also discussed preparing a paper for a conference on
their experience, and I love how they have documented all their
discussions online - including three blog entries
(1,
2
and
3),
an audio recording of a
meeting,
and the script of the
presentation.

I am very encouraged by this willingness, not only to experiment, but
also to reflect, connect with others, discuss, and share the discussion
and open it to everyone. It’s a discussion I am certainly hoping to
participate in, both as a student, teacher, researcher and advocate.